Rutgers Researchers Receive $18 Million Grant for the Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science

The center will examine the effects of advertising, packaging, and labeling on perceptions, use and exposure of tobacco products

Rutgers will share an $18 million grant with the University of Pennsylvania to examine the effects of tobacco marketing on public health.

The five-year grant – from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health – will support research in the Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS) at the Rutgers School of Public Health and Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. It is an extension of an earlier grant geared toward providing data that will protect public health and inform regulatory science issues related to tobacco control.

The tobacco center focuses on examining the effects of advertising, packaging and labeling on perceptions, use and exposure of combustible tobacco products such as cigarettes and cigarillos. Rutgers researchers bring expertise in population surveillance and experimental survey methods, cigar policy, tobacco product risk perception, intentions and use as well as tobacco industry advertising and marketing to better understand the impact of potentially misleading advertising claims, descriptors, labeling and packaging features of certain combustible tobacco products.

“The greatest contributor to tobacco-caused disease is from cigarettes and other combustible products. Tobacco regulatory science can inform the FDA on future steps that can reduce harm from the most dangerous tobacco products and have the greatest potential to improve public health,” said Cristine Delnevo, director of the Center for Tobacco Studies at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

Delnevo, principal investigator of the project, along with Andrew Strasser, director of the Biobehavioral Smoking Laboratory at Penn’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction,  said a team of collaborative researchers who have been committed to tobacco regulatory science since the passage of the 2009 Family Smoking have been assembled to investigate this issue.

“Perceptions of risk and product expectations begin when individuals encounter product marketing and labeling. We are taking a comprehensive approach to better understand the arc from advertising and packaging of combustible tobacco products, through use patterns and exposure,” Strasser said.

The center will focus on four primary projects and four cores, including:

• A rigorous assessment of smoking behaviors, subjective responses and biological exposures to examine the effect of cigarette packaging on smoking low nicotine content cigarettes, an important interaction of two potential regulatory strategies.
• Experimental analysis of low nicotine cigarette advertising and novel tobacco product marketing with an aim to identify how the public is misinformed about health risks.
• Experimental analysis of how cigarillo packaging with varying colors, graphic designs, descriptors and warning labels influence perceptions and use.
• Examining the effect of cigarette descriptors that can mislead about the health harms of tobacco products.

The cores will provide essential training and career enhancement opportunities; support for biosample, analytic and regulatory strategies to maximize the center’s contribution to the empirical knowledge base; and a continual surveillance of the tobacco industry’s marketing strategies for combustible tobacco products.

Collaborators with Delnevo at the Rutgers School of Public Health include Olivia Wackowski and Jane Lewis. Additional Penn project and core leaders include Janet Audrain-McGovern and Melissa Mercincavage in psychiatry and Joseph Cappella at the Annenberg School for Communication. The Penn-Rutgers TCORS will also collaborate with researchers at other institutions including Columbia University, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Georgetown University Medical Center, University of Nevada-Reno and University of Vermont.